This invention relates in general to temperature measuring and indicating apparatus, and particular to apparatus for separately measuring and indicating the skin temperature at two points bilaterally disposed across the spinal column of a person.
Measuring the temperature at various body points of a living organism, whether human or animal, is a recognized technique for diagnosing the existence and possible nature of body malfunctions or ailments. The measurement of internal body temperature is one well-known diagnostic technique, and other known diagnostic techniques involved measuring the external or skin temperature at one or more locations on the body. In the practice of chiropractic, for example, the presence of a neural imbalance may be indicated by localized anomalies of the skin temperature in a known relation to the point of imbalance. If the chiropractor can detect the presence and location of a neural imbalance by measuring the resulting temperature anomaly, which may be in the order of a few tenths of a degree fahrenheit, he may then seek to correct the underlying cause of the neural imbalance by adjusting the spinal column of the patient.
With the knowledge that neural imbalances may be detected by measuring skin temperature adjacent the spinal column, diagnostic devices have been proposed in the prior art for measuring skin temperature in the vicinity of the spinal column. Such prior devices generally seek to obtain a measurement based on the skin temperature at two bilateral points, that is, two points lying on a line approximately perpendicular to the spinal column and spaced approximately equidistant from the spinal column. Such diagnostic temperature measuring devices of the prior art have generally been less than satisfactory, however, for a number of reasons. Some such devices measured only the presence of a temperature differential between the two bilateral locations, and thus failed to show either the actual skin temperature or the specific temperatures producing a bilateral temperature anomaly. Other problems associated with such skin temperature measuring instruments of the prior art have included an unacceptably slow reaction time, poor accuracy, and difficulty in locating for spinal adjustment the particular location along the spinal column at which the temperature anomaly was measured.